Parsing (also referred to as syntactic analysis) is a process of analyzing a set of symbols that may be in a string or similar format, where a ‘string’ is sequence of items in this case symbols where the sequence is finite and the symbols are selected from a set of possible symbols referred to as an alphabet. The parsing process can be applied to natural languages, computer languages and similar systems including DNA sequences. The parsing process applies a set of rules of formal grammar specific to the language being processed. The parsing process is a computer implemented process and the term is used in the sense understood by the field of computer science and more specifically within the field of computational linguistics.
Within computational linguistics the parsing process is further understood to be used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer processor and program of a sentence or other string of words in a natural or computer language into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing the syntactic relation of each constituent to each other constituent. This parse tree can also contain semantic information and other relevant information about the sentence or string of words being processed.
In some applications within computer science, the parsing process is used in the analysis of computer languages and involves the syntactic analysis of an input code into its component parts in order to facilitate the subsequent functions of compilers and/or interpreters that function to convert code written in one computer language into an executable form, i.e. a computer language that a computer processor is capable of executing.